by James Tarr
“I think you may have to wait a bit on that, boss.”
“What part of the city you grow up in?” Barb asked Quentin. They were walking back toward the general store after dropping off the case of energy bars with the rest of Theodore. Barb had ten loaded magazines weighing down her shoulder bag, but she wasn’t complaining. They were sharing an energy bar and a bottle of water.
“I didn’t.”
“Oh? I thought you were a local.”
“Grew up in Toledo. Only came here a couple years after the fighting started, once I started thinking for myself and figured out who the bad guys really were. Which…feels like my whole life.”
“I hear that.”
Quentin glanced at her. Barb had a lot of gray hair. “You’ve got kids, right?”
She nodded. “Grandkids.”
“In the city?”
“No, they went south. Begged me to go too, when all this craziness started, but I guess I’m stupid and crazy. Least that’s what my girl Jackie told me. This is my city, so I’m going to stick by it.” She shrugged. “I never thought I was political, but after working two jobs and raising four kids to always do the right thing, a government shutting down websites and putting people in jail just for criticizing it was enough to get my back up, and that was before they doubled my taxes to pay for all the new government programs, gave the right to vote to illegals and unending free shit to lazy asses who don’t do nothing but vote for more free shit for theyselves.”
Quentin snorted. “You sound like my uncle.”
They reached the last house before the market. It was almost directly across the street from the boarded-up two story brown brick building where Curly kept all the good stuff, and Quentin guessed Ed and Weasel were inside there now. He glanced over at the building, but couldn’t see anything on the second floor through the reflective tint on the windows.
“I’m gonna hang here, wait for Ed and Weez to finish their business,” Quentin told Barb. He didn’t want to hang around inside the market, not with half a dozen soldiers there.
“You mind some company?”
“No ma’am.”
“Don’t you do that. Don’t you dare. I already feel old enough. You call me ma’am again and I’ll kick your ass. And don’t call me auntie, I hate that shit too.”
They were both laughing as they moved into the shade of the front porch. Quentin sat down on one of two chairs that somehow hadn’t been stolen or vandalized. Barb stepped up to the front door and knocked, getting a surprised look from her companion.
“Plenty ‘a houses in this city look abandoned, but ain’t,” she told him. “Doesn’t pay to advertise you might have stuff to steal. But if we’re going to sit on their porch, it’s only polite to ask permission first if someone’s here.”
No one responded to her knock, and after peering through one of the grimy windows, she took the chair opposite Quentin. They sat for a while on the porch, staring off in the distance, lost in their own thoughts.
“It’s going to come back.”
“What?” Quentin looked up. “What is?”
“The city,” she told him. “It’s been going downhill since I was a girl. The riots, white flight, black flight, Murder Capital, Devil’s Night fires, corrupt hip hop mayors, worthless city councils…the war’s just the latest thing, you know? But you look at what’s going on in there,” she gestured at the hulk of the market, “and the rest of the city. Folks making it, putting in the work that needs to be done. It’s the people that make a city. A city ain’t the houses or the streets or the sidewalks, it’s the people who live there. The people who are here, who are still here after all this, they know how to put in the work. Are putting in the work, in spite of everything.”
“A city may be people, but you still need roads and houses. How much of the city is even standing?” he wondered.
“You’d be surprised. It won’t be the same,” she agreed. “More garden and farmland inside the city limits than since the French and British were fightin’ each other ‘round here. Or was it the French and Indians? Don’t matter. What matters is that the people who are still here are stubborn, and they know how to work. If they didn’t know, they learned. I think, probably, that the same is true for the people all over this country. The war didn’t get rid of all the lazy weak people, but it sure thinned the herd, you know? Once we get through this, it’ll be an uphill road, but it’ll be a better country. Maybe not for us, but for my grandbabies.”
“I never took you for an optimist.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Is that what I am? I think it’s more nature than anything else. Nature moves in cycles. Things have been so bad for so long here, I think it has to get better, to balance everything out.”
Quentin just grunted. He didn’t know what he believed any more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Everyone clear on the next RP?” Ed asked. “We’ve got a couple hours before dark, but the move is only a mile and a half or so. No need to hurry. We’ve got a lot of houses in this area but not many people, so there are plenty of bolt-holes if you need them. I want big intervals and multiple routes of travel, so anyone paying attention, even an eye in the sky, won’t be sure we’re all together. And don’t be obvious with your rifles, if possible. What’d we codename this one, Happy Indian?” He looked around the table. The house they were heading to was on Cheyenne just south of Joy Road—their codenames were simple so they were easy to remember.
“Yeah,” Mark told him.
There was a safe house operated by the “underground railroad” less than half a mile from Happy Indian, but Ed didn’t want to use it. Didn’t even want to go near it. It was known, and used, by a number of dogsoldiers, and he wanted Theodore to keep as low a profile as possible before arriving at Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous. That included avoiding other squads.
“We’re only four miles from where this “family reunion” is happening, and we’ve got a couple of days to get there. The closer we get to Uncle Charlie’s meeting time the more careful I want to be. I’ve got a feeling, I think this is big. Franklin got the word, and I don’t know if Mickey is going but they obviously knew about it as well.”
The squad was standing around the kitchen table where he’d spread out his deteriorating map. The mood was good as everyone was full up on energy bars, fresh water, and some of Renny’s venison jerky, plus Ed had acquired a surprising number of much-needed items. A dozen new-in-the-packaging rechargeable lithium batteries, twenty bottles of water now distributed among their packs, six military MREs, half a bottle of children’s gummi multi-vitamins, a fifty-round box of Curly’s specialty 9mm ammo for Weasel, one bottle of amoxicillin, a Survivor Filter water bottle, and an honest-to-God mini drone. It was a commercial product and seemed almost new, and Curly had both the controller and owner’s manual. The squad hadn’t had a working drone in forever. For all of that Ed had traded Curly a total of twenty-five loaded magazines and two grenades, but even after donating an additional ten magazines to Mickey every AR carrier in Theodore had nearly fifteen 30-round magazines.
Uncle Charlie’s rendezvous spot was almost four miles directly north of their current location, but Ed didn’t want to head straight in. The squad would be heading north and a bit west to a house they’d laid up in before. It had several rain traps, and a few engineered leaks in the roof to keep two mattresses and several blankets wet to provide cover from the thermal imagers on the Kestrels.
“You think it’s somehow related to that detention center raid?” Weasel asked. They’d spread the word about that to the rest of the squad.
Ed looked at George, then Early, and all three men shook their heads in agreement. “I don’t see how it could be,” Ed said. “Not directly.”
George added, “There are no detention centers within five hundred miles of here. That we’ve heard about, at least, but definitely not in the metro area. Just the jail the Tabs are running downtown, and I don’t know how many people are even in that. And if th
at’s what someone at the ARF brain trust has in mind for us, raiding that, we might all have to think about doing a hard pass. Place is a fortress, and every Toad they’ve got is two minutes away. It’d be suicide.”
“You hear anything at the general store, people you overheard, or from Mickey or talking to Curly? Any sense that something unusual’s going on?”
Ed shook his head. “No. Mickey might have intel, but if they’ve got it and we’re not cleared we’ll never know about it. Shelly makes me look like a neighborhood gossip. She probably knows where Hoffa’s buried and who really shot JFK.”
“Those chicks are tight with operational security,” Weasel agreed.
“Barb’d carve you like a turkey if she heard you call her a chick,” Mark scolded him. That every woman on Mickey carried a hidden knife in addition to whatever guns they might have was an unverified rumor everyone believed. The rumor implied it was a result of rapes, or attempted rapes, back when the war was new, which was completely plausible. The city was hellishly dangerous for anyone, but especially women, and the city was Disneyland for women compared to Thunderdome.
“What’s Hoffa?” Jason asked.
“Sweet Jesus, son, you make me feel old,” Early said to him, frowning.
Since he was already irritating the man with questions, Jason decided on one more. “Why do we call them Tabs?”
Early blinked. “I guess I don’t know.”
“I do,” George said. He fixed Jason with a stare, and as he told the story the rest of the squad listened in, as only a few had ever heard it before. “Early on at the beginning of all this shit, before the shooting really started, a TV news crew got invited to tag along with a federal tactical unit that was doing a raid on a house. Nice house, in the suburbs somewhere. The raid team is all in black, body armor, rifles, helmets, balaclavas, the whole tactical ninja look. If I remember correctly they’d gotten a tip that the homeowner had some banned guns he hadn’t turned in for destruction. Knocked down the front door with a ram, came in shouting, whole shock and awe thing, but all they did was scare the crap out of the guy and his family who were watching TV. Kept him in handcuffs and the wife and kids at gunpoint while they searched the place. They didn’t find any banned guns, just a couple of bolt action .22 rifles that you’d use for plinking or shooting squirrels. This was after they outlawed all the scary evil black guns, but before they banned all firearms.
“But, see, they weren’t happy about that, they wanted to look like heroes in front of the cameras. So, when they found some leftover PVC pipe in his basement that he’d used to repair one of his sinks they arrested him for constructive intent to build silencers. Which is a federal felony. Multiple federal felonies, one for every piece of plastic tubing. So they tell him this, guys in body armor and helmets yanking him up, telling him he’s going to federal prison for a couple decades, right in front of his little girls who are terrified and his wife is crying. The guy is completely in shock, because he’s not a criminal, he doesn’t know shit about silencers, doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong, hell, he hasn’t done anything wrong, and he keeps saying they’ve got the wrong guy, that there’s been a mistake. He keeps saying over and over again that they’re making a mistake. And the head SWAT guy is playing it up for the cameras, being a smartass, and says, laughing it up, ‘Like I haven’t heard that before. Put it on my tab.’ That video got shown on the evening news, and it didn’t get much attention, at least not until the guy got shanked in jail later that week and died. Then it exploded all over social media. He became a martyr for the cause, shall we say. And right about then is when a lot of people decided to take a stand and shit went seriously sideways.”
“I never heard that before,” Renny admitted.
“I have,” Weasel said bitterly. He frowned at George. “That happen before or after you took out that fed raid team?”
“It happened two weeks after I went on the run,” George said. “Helped me confirm I’d made the right decision. Time to go. Christ,” he muttered, shouldering his pack. He shook his head and gave Ed a wry smile. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain since the weight is all water and ammo.”
“No, you shouldn’t.” Ed cocked his head at Jason, who was looking a little unsure at the thought of a solo patrol. “Kid, you wandered around the city for a week looking for us. Now you’ve got a better gun, armor, grenades, and half a dozen guys who’ll come running in your direction if they hear anything. You’ll be fine.”
The houses were mostly two-story duplexes with red brick and white siding, nearly all the streets running due north/south and east/west. There were few trees, at least at first, and the men of Theodore felt very exposed, which is exactly why Ed had them stagger their departures and routes so much, so they looked anything like a military unit on the move. Mark and Weasel walked west into the Fire Nation before turning north. Jason had instructions to move a block or two east before turning north, and George was five minutes behind him. Renny headed directly north, Quentin followed ten minutes after him, and Ed ambled after him a few minutes later. Early was the last person to leave the house.
Jason had been told to not be in any hurry, that stealth was more important than speed. Still, he had to fight the urge to move fast. The yards were mostly overgrown, but there were occasional signs of habitation or people passing through the area. He walked slowly through the grass close to the residences, pausing frequently to look around and listen, ready to duck between houses if he heard vehicles or aircraft.
After a quarter mile the two-story duplexes shrank to small brick bungalows. He passed several diamond-shaped orange signs warning of road construction ahead. After ten years in the sun and wind their orange had faded to a pale peach. He never saw any evidence of actual construction.
The new rifle still felt strange in his hand, but he was getting used to the armor plates squeezing his chest and back. His backpack was heavy with ammo and water, but for once he didn’t mind. He took a brief pause after moving a third of a mile or so. The houses here were stacked close together, separated only by the width of their driveways, and he stood in the shadow between two houses, sipping a bottle of water, watching and listening. Nearly every house had a detached one- or two-car garage in back, some of them in very poor condition. All of the back yards were fenced as well, which would have made travel through them slow and noisy.
Most of the houses had their first floors four feet or so above ground level, and their covered porches were six steps off the front sidewalk. When moving through neighborhoods Jason always felt there were dozens of eyes following him, but knew this was probably his imagination. Probably.
He relieved himself against the side of the house, put the half-empty bottle of water into a side pocket of his pack, and moved out again. On the next block he passed behind the hulk of an elementary school. It was an old building, with an ornate brick chimney. The building itself seemed undamaged, but it was dark and quiet.
A few hundred yards farther up was a major cross-street, Warren Avenue, code-named Pocahontas by the dogsoldiers for some unknown reason, eventually shortened to Poke. There were one-story businesses lining either side of the road, which was two lanes in each direction.
He crossed an alley. There was a bakery on the right and the fire-scarred shell of a strip mall on the left. Across Poke was a large gray building that looked like a warehouse and from the signage used to be a wholesale distributor. Of what, he had no idea.
Jason stepped through a hole in the cinderblock wall and stood inside the end store of the destroyed strip mall. He moved through the debris toward the front of the store and looked out at the street, craning his head to peer as far as he could in both directions, east and west. He’d traveled half a mile in not much more than twenty minutes, so he had plenty of time.
A shirtless man rode a bicycle down the middle of Pocahontas, his chain squeaking. The squeaking brought three dogs out of the ruined door of the bakery. They stared after the bicyclist and sniffed the air. One w
as a cute black and white collie, the other a huge brindle boxer, and the third a short-haired white terrier who couldn’t have weighed fifteen pounds. After a few seconds of indecision they headed south, retracing Jason’s route, trotting along the sidewalk.
Several hundred yards west in the middle of Pocahontas was something large and dark. It rose from the center of the street and from his vantage point it looked like a big piece of furniture sitting in a sinkhole, but Jason knew that couldn’t be right. Stretching out behind it, running down the street past him and heading east into the distance were two wide marks on the pavement he couldn’t quite understand.
As he tried to figure out what he was looking at, his mind wandered. Joining up with ARF…it wasn’t what he’d thought it would be. He’d thought he’d get a uniform and be with a bunch of other guys his age, marching and training and then fighting. He realized now that was totally idiotic. That’s not what the war was, at least not here, and maybe not anywhere.
The men of Theodore weren’t what he was expecting either. Then again…they were. Ed looked like an accountant, but he had the confidence and ease of command and carried himself like the experienced veteran he was. George seemed the closest thing to a professional soldier of anyone in the squad and had cut the throats of two downed soldiers so emotionlessly it had chilled Jason to the bone. Early appeared to be just a dumb redneck, but for a big man with a big gun he could move without making a sound and was far smarter than he first seemed. Quentin, Weasel, Mark…none of them were who or what he’d pictured when he’d thought of dogsoldiers. And yet that’s exactly who they were. What they were. None of them had been professional soldiers, they were just ordinary people who’d been forced, or chosen, to become soldiers. Like himself, he supposed.
And here he was, on his own, trusted, wearing armor and carrying a full-auto military rifle, inside the infamous city itself, heading to some sort of secret rendezvous. Truthfully he felt like a fraud, still only playing at being a soldier, but vowed to live up to the expectations of everyone else in Theodore.